I saw the original cast of "Jacques Brel . . . " in NYC in the '60s, and have loved the cast album in all the years since, both for itself and for the introduction it provided to clips and recordings of Brel singing his own songs. I bought this DVD in the hopes of seeing Mort Shuman and Elly Stone singing the songs I first heard them sing at the Village Gate. Big bummer. Mort and Elly---and Jacques---are here, but they're buried beneath the frenzied prancing of the extras, the silly stagings, some remarkably horrible lip-syncing and all the rest of the unnecessary, overproduced hoopla. The songs, as presented here, approach the unwatchable. My own favourite Brel song, "Timid Frieda" ("Les Timides"), mesmerizing on the CD, becomes twittering and trivial. This film adds nothing to the original cast recording, with the exception of several songs not on the CD. Those include Brel's moving performance of "Ne Me Quitte Pas," which even the notes on the DVD case call "the true showstopper"---a telling admission that the rest of the movie ain't gonna measure up. Wish I could have read that before I bought the DVD.